Nai and Meyer Fungal Biol Biotechnol (2016) 3:10 DOI 10.1186/s40694-016-0028-4 Fungal Biology and Biotechnology COMMENTARY Open Access The beauty and the morbid: fungi as source of inspiration in contemporary art Corrado Nai1,2* and Vera Meyer1* Abstract The arts have the power to irritate, to provoke and to let us think and dream about the impossible. The relationship of the arts and fungi is not immediate; however, fungi are ideal subjects for artists. They are both visible and invisible. They irritate. They evoke within each of us different feelings and inner pictures. Some are perceived as disgusting or dangerous because associated with dirt or death. Others are appreciated for their unique and delicious taste in our eating culture. Microbiologists further consider them as useful for industrial exploitation or per se as interesting because they are gratifying objects to study basic phenomena of life. To stimulate a fertile and interdisciplinary dia- logue between artists and fungal scientists, we here present some examples of the inspirational powers of fungi and fungal science for contemporary art. Astonishing, poetic and perplexing artistic works could release scientific creativ- ity and overcome the boundaries between art and science. Keywords: Science and art, Bioart, Contemporary art, Fungi, Fungal-based materials, Burial suit “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. fight itself towards the summits suffices to fill a heart of Fail better.” Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) describes in his man. We have to imagine Sisyphus as a happy man” (vari- 1983 novella Worstward Ho [1] the very essence of the ant translation). artistic process itself. Every person who has ever worked in a research environment can relate to those words The blurred boundary of science and art too. Negative results, hard-to-interpret data and techni- There used to be a time when science and art went cal troubleshooting are a conspicuous part of the scien- hand in hand. Perhaps because “Man cannot do without tific process of every experimenter, regardless of her/his beauty” [4] or perhaps because both essentially have the experience or the nature of the scientific question. And as same aim: to investigate and understand nature and (as such they are also the necessary prelude to the satisfac- part of it) ourselves. Still, insights into the world we are tion of a successful experiment and to the elation of dis- living in are explored by different means and generate covering something no one has ever seen before. Failures different knowledge and experiences: rational, materialis- are part of the joys of experimenting. To negate this is tic ones (science) and emotional, vivid ones (art). to deny the functioning of science itself. By the words of In the Renaissance period, Leonardo da Vinci (1452– Jules Verne (1828–1905): “Science, my boy, is made up of 1519) combined the arts and science as a painter, inven- mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, tor, sculptor and mathematician. His artistic works were because they lead little by little to the truth” [2]. And to the result of his scientific investigations. Much later, say it with the words of Albert Camus (1913–1960): “La Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) documented lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur his voyages as explorer and naturalist with beautifully d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux” [3]—“The accurate (or accurately beautiful) drawings. Many more examples can be made of thinkers who contributed sig- *Correspondence: corrado.nai@tu‑berlin.de; vera.meyer@tu‑berlin.de nificantly in the past to the advancement of both science 1 Department Applied and Molecular Microbiology, Institute and the arts. Several reasons could be ascribed to that. of Biotechnology, Berlin University of Technology, Gustav‑Meyer‑Allee 25, Curricula where more encompassing and scholars were 13355 Berlin, Germany Full list of author information is available at the end of the article trained also in classical disciplines, something which is © The Author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/ publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Nai and Meyer Fungal Biol Biotechnol (2016) 3:10 Page 2 of 5 nowadays not possible anymore due to the high speciali- music (e.g. in singer-songwriter John K. Samson’s When sation and thus fragmentation of scientific and artistic I Write my Master’s Thesis or in his more recent Postdoc disciplines. Intellectuals belonged to elitist circles and Blues; or also in the transliteration of the DNA sequence personal connections among representatives of different or methylation patterns into music [7]), dance (as in the fields were nurtured, as for the friendship between the Dance Your PhD contest sponsored by the magazine Sci- painter Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) and the “father of ence), theatre (e.g. in the program fostered by the Alfred microbiology” Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), P. Sloan Foundation to exhort leading artists to explore contemporaries of the Golden Age of the Baroque, the scientific themes), the visual arts (e.g. in Salvador Dalì’s period following the Renaissance. During these days, rendering of the DNA double helix in his Butterfly Land- scientific insights into nature were limited and all knowl- scape—The Great Masturbator in a Surrealist Landscape edge could be conveyed through curricula. As exchange with DNA), illustration (e.g. in a Kickstarter campaign between scientists and artists was very intense and lively, to produce a children book to show the contribution of many intellectuals were generalists. woman in science throughout history), architecture (for These educational, professional and social milieus are example in the investigation of fungi as construction today radically different. Scientists became specialists material), poetry (which, like science, gets at universal with very limited knowledge of the other’s disciplines, insights through metaphors and abstract thinking, or tools and technologies. C.P. Snow (1905–1980) argues as testified by so-called “science slams”, an offshoot of in “The two cultures and the scientific revolution” [5] that “poetry slams”), literature (as for the “science-in-fiction” the intellectual life of the modern Western world became genre pioneered by the celebrated chemist Carl Djerassi), separated into two cultures—science and the humani- and the cinematic arts (as shown in the yearly festival by ties—and that this separation hinders us to solve prob- the non-profit organisation Imagine Science Film). The lems of mankind. Indeed, open-minded personalities of Scenes collection from Imagine Science Film for example scientists and much translation work is nowadays nec- gathers footage from scientists to visualize the beauty of essary to run research projects involving multidiscipli- scientific raw data images, with minimal interventions of nary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches post-production editing and human narrative. which are key to understand complex phenomena. And the proactive exchange between science and art? Almost Fungi in the art scene gone. This discrepancy shines through the words of Max The relationship of fungi and the arts is not immedi- Planck (1858–1947): “Experiment is the only means of ate. However, with their protean and versatile character, knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, their morbid beauty and Janus-faced head, they recently imagination.” But is he also encompassing artistic experi- became hot protagonists in the scene. One might think mentations? And where does the creativity drive for about the (ab)use of them—or of chemical derivatives innovative experiments come from, if not from the power thereof—as psychoactive substances as in the drug- of imagination? fuelled counterculture and artistic hippy movement of In the preface to his autobiographical book LSD— the 1960s (“you’ve just had some kind of mushroom/and My Problem Child [6], Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) your mind is moving low” sang the Jefferson Airplane in describes how in his boyhood he occasionally perceived White Rabbit). Interestingly enough, it has been pro- nature with intense, almost mystical sensations. Reflect- posed that the consumption of hallucinogenic substances ing on his impossibility in communicating these expe- of fungal origin might have contributed to the advance- riences by artistic means due to his lack of vocational ment of knowledge throughout history [6] long before inclinations toward painting or poetry, he often antici- the recreational use of fungal-derived drugs like LSD in pated his very personal failure. Recalling his career, he the 1960s (Fig. 1). A recent example is given by the 1993 considered a lucky accident that his vocational interests Chemistry Nobel Prize holder Kary Mullis who claimed were directed towards (fungal) natural products and that that his consumption of LSD played a role in the discov- he discovered LSD and its psychoactive effects, able to ery of PCR [8]. open wide the doors of perception. Back into the art scene, the celebrated contemporary Luckily, many artists and artistic fields get nowadays German artists Anselm Kiefer puts giant mushrooms at creative impulses and become technologically empow- centre stage in his installation Über Deutschland, shown ered by scientific breakthroughs to investigate nature during his 2016 retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in using artistic methodologies. Artistic fields that became Paris. There, the fungi are used as symbol of decadence, inspired by science are as various as photography (e.g. destruction, rebirth, and as source of inspiration for phi- in the nature-inspired captures by Rosamund Purcell, losophers.